And it’s getting closer. I was returning from work tonight to find my local shopping parade taped off and crawling with cops. A man was shot six times while sitting in his parked car.
This happened about 150 yards from my home.
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June 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Yes, the USA is through to the last eight of the World Cup, despite, our news people are telling us, nobody in the USA giving a damn. But of course that’s the reason. Why did those wretched Irishmen miss all those penalties yesterday? Because the Irelandosphere in its entirety was watching in agony, and the poor fellows knew it. If you’re a Mexican with a chance of scoring, all those millions of Mexicans, brothers and cousins and uncles among them, clustered round their TV sets, howling and gasping like wounded animals, flash through your mind at the critical moment and your legs turn to seaweed. In contrast, when a US player gets a shot at goal, it’s between him and few dozen other Ivy League type blokes, none of whom are that bothered, so in it goes. USA 2 Mexico 0. Nevertheless, my favourite US drama today is the lady forest ranger who confessed that, in the course of burning a letter from her estranged husband, she had also set fire to the entire state of Colorado. Why did she confess? Easy. This is the ultimate in saying: “Look what you made me do!” Hell hath no fury, and so on. But this does make we want to rethink female equality when it comes to owning or controlling thermonuclear weapons. June 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I am at long last able to post my stories directly so if I have any readers out there who still remember my name… expect to hear from me on a much more regular basis in the coming weeks. Since the end of February when we “upgraded” to BloggerPro I’ve had to send my raw html text to Chief Editor Perry de Havilland for insertion. I understand Perry loves matching html tag pairs with a passion only outdone by his love of reading the London telephone directory in braille. The sales blurbs claimed lack of support for Linux was a “temporary” matter. Unfortunately, I do not have a great deal of time for anything beyond my consulting work and some activities with the National Space Society, so the extra burden was just enough to make me think twice when an article started buzzing about my head…enough trouble that I tended to swat the idea away rather than do anything about it. Then preparations for the ISDC (International Space Development Conference) hotted up as April slipped into May. I am the Chair of the National Space Society committee that oversees the local Conference committee so this kept me rather busy. More so as I was dumb enough to also volunteer to run a track of programming on Novel Propulsion Systems on top of assisting with liaison between NSS and the Moon Society (Artemis Project) on the lunar programming track… Speaking of the Lunar Track… No Glenn, I didn’t see the anti-capitalist, anti-settlement, anti-commercial space, anti-space resources, anti-property rights, anti… [you get the picture] guy who decided he’d like to speak at our conference. I was running my own track next door at the time with speakers talking about fun things like Launch Loops, Gas Guns, Electrodynamic Tethers and the like, so I didn’t have a chance. However I can confirm there were no bloodstains left over in the Lunar Track room by Banquet time, so our lads and lasses were polite enough to let the fellow get out of our midst alive. Darn. I really must give the fellow (Richard Steiner) credit for courage. Walking into a room full of space activists who would shave their grannies into hamburger for a chance to get off the planet and suggesting the entire Moon be made off limits to settlement is not something to be attempted by the faint of heart. It also won’t happen and we wouldn’t obey it even if it did happen. Besides… on the surface of the moon environuts are easily dealt with. If one should chain their self to a rock (no trees!)… No prob. We’ll just sit back in the cab of our lunar rover and take bets on when their Oxygen runs out. June 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A few days ago I did a posting about the EU, and ended it by saying that all Americans should oppose the EU because the EU is anti-American. But then I thought, yes, but so are lots of Americans, so maybe that won’t work so well as an argument as it should. Great minds think alike (but the winner is the one who writes it first). Read this, from “Anglosphere: Why I am not an Anglophile”, a UPI piece of yesterday (Saturday) by Mr Anglosphere himself, James C. Bennett:
Presumably anti-American Americans like the EU because it is anti-American. My thanks to Professor Instapundit himself for guiding me to this piece. June 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
On 27th of May, two eminent medical professors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Professor N.J. Wald and Professor A.V. Hoffbrand are seriously peeved that the recommendations of the advisory scientific committee on nutrition (COMA) are not going to be supported by the government. Those recommendations are to require by law that all bread in the United Kingdom is fortified with folic acid. This is already mandatory in the USA. In their letter the government funded professors wrote:
First off, let me say that I certainly agree that increasing ones intake of Folic acid has beneficial effects (I take a pill of the stuff myself every day). However that efficacy or otherwise of folic acid is utterly irrelevant. By what warped moral value does COMA and professors Wald and Hoffbrand have the right to decide that the entire population are going to be medicated by the state? There is only one person who has the right to decide if I will add chemicals to my body and that person is me. The only conceivable morally justified circumstances in which I might be medicated against my will is that of highly infectious dangerous diseases, on the theory that if I have smallpox (or whatever) then I would pose a clear threat to others. Yet that is not the case here, and neither is it in the case of water fluoridation. Both are probably harmless and even beneficial yet it would seem that the morality of using the violence of the state to impose the judgement of technocrats like Wald and Hoffbrand does not even get a mention. If because it is said to be objectively beneficial to force people to ingest certain chemicals, then why not also allow Wald and Hoffbrand to decide what the nations subjects will be required to eat and not eat? High fat low fibre MacDonald’s burgers? Why not just make them illegal and require all restaurants to serve state approved menus set by COMA? If these professors have no moral problem forcibly medicating millions of people every day ‘for their own good’ then why not try to reduce the incidence of heart disease by shutting down the burger joints and pizza parlours? Except for communicable diseases, there is no such thing as ‘public health’. My diet and supplements are none of Wald and Hoffbrand’s damn business. How dare they try to put chemicals in MY body without my personal and explicit permission? Of course the totalitarian mindset demonstrated by these people, rooted in collectivist hubris and moral relativism, sees choice itself as irrational… morality does not even come into it. Yet even on the amoral utilitarian basis under which such people operate and to which they would required us to submit our very body chemistry, we all know how well the state’s retained scientists can be trusted regarding ‘public health’. Look at how well they did regarding ‘mad cow disease’. June 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Where can I lay my hands on a copy of the Devil’s Dictionary? Is it a shortcoming on my part that I have never encountered this particular lexicon before? Maybe, maybe not but that would explain why its definition of the Common Law as ‘the whim of judges’ came as such a revelation to me. Having had the benefit (or otherwise) of a legal education, I have always subscribed to the view that the Common Law was a body of law consisting primarily of judicial decisions based on custom and precendent. I know this cannot be too far wide of the mark because it bears an uncanny resemblance to the definition of the Common Law according to Websters. You see, Antoine, there is nothing ‘whimsical’ about the process at all. In fact, it developed, from the ground up I might add, in order to preclude whimsy and provide certainty. Your charge that many judges are ‘social justice creeps’ is most certainly true but I would hazard that this is a problem which is generational rather than systemic. Those warming the benches in our Courts now were manning the student barricades in 1968 and they have simply completed their long march through the institutions with their imprimaturs largely intact. This is a problem, granted, but it is a universal problem because for sanctuary from judges we beg the mercy of politicians in parliament and dare I suggest that there might be the odd ‘social justice creep’ in there as well, or should that thought perish? Besides whilst you are free to look up any relevant Statute, what, may I ask, is stopping you from reading law reports for the precedents? To blame Britain’s litigious culture on the Common Law is rather like blaming the poor performance of the NHS on tax cuts. Rather it is State Law or Statute (or Napoleonic Code) synthesised by politicians and handed down to us like the miserable serfs we are, that has stomped all over so many of the sound, long -established Common Law principles that used to protect us from frivolous or vexatious claims as well as nationalising lawyers and judges alike and rendering them mere amplifiers of state policy. When a burglar sues a homeowner because he tripped over their carpet, we are rightly outraged but you should blame the Occupiers Liability Act. Similarly, when an entrepreneur is hauled in front of a tribunal and forced to pay a hefty fine for failing to provide adequate childcare facilities or a sufficiently happy work environment it is not the Common Law at work, rather it is the various Employment Acts. And would it be indelicate of me to point out that the phalanx of Anti-Discrimination Acts have given birth to not just a litigious culture but an entire (taxpayer-funded, I might add) grievance industry? Nobody, to my knowledge, has made the absurd claim that the Common Law would ‘automatically sort everything out’. Nothing will ‘automatically sort everything out’. But I would venture that the Common Law was more organic, more reasonable and better fitted to serve a healthy and prosperous civil society than the instruments of social engineering that have largely replaced it. Was it fallible? Yes. Name me a system that isn’t. June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In a posting earlier today, Paul Marks said some nice things about South Dakota. It’s an interesting place — wide open spaces, low taxes and few people. You might wonder why in this place of rugged individualists Democrats consistently win public office. Perhaps the South Dakota website didn’t mention the large number of Indians (Native-Americans as they are now called) who vote a solid bloc for Democrats who continue to keep them in the bondage of federal handouts. This population has opted out of assimilation encouraged by the federal agency whose existence relies on maintaining this population literally ‘on the reservation.’ Driving through these reservations is a mind altering experience. Vast tracts of featureless landscape dotted with tiny habitations looking like a National Geographic documentary on public television depicting the deperate poverty of equatorial Africa. It’s a disgrace and the natural result of what happens when people are encouraged to believe that they are victims and can’t be expected to be responsble for themselves. Evelyn Palmeri June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Being young in those times meant suppressing the sound of one’s own breathing. June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
England is at now a standstill watching the wretched Danish football team collapse in the face of England’s team, and thus allow England through to the last eight of the little soccer tournament in the Far East that we keep referring to. Watching and now celebrating. The Danes were never in it, poor fellows, and I really feel for their goalie, who had a “mare”, as one of our TV pundits rather charmingly describes unsatisfactory dreams. So some bloggage from me is in order, to keep the blog rolling. Last night (Friday June 14) Mark Littlewood of Liberty spoke at the June Putney Debate, and confirmed how useful it was for the likes of Tom Burroughes and David Carr to show up at that Liberty Conference. Mark stressed how just a couple of questions from the floor can change the whole atmosphere of a day. So Tom was right about how it’s worth our team attending these things, and David probably did far better then he realised. I committed a hideous social blunder. My socialising skills are excellent, with just four deviations from total perfection: (1) I have a shocking memory for names, (2) I have a shocking memory for faces, (3) I am shockingly bad at putting together any names and faces that I do sort of remember, and (4) I am, in general, often quite rude to people. So when I arrived I saw lots of familiar faces, and one that I knew I knew, but didn’t actually know. I know you, I said, but, please tell me who you are. It turned out to be Mark Littlewood. The last time I met Mark, he was a speaker at a libertarian conference and I was chairing the session. He’s a long time Libertarian Alliance supporter and we’re supposed to be well acquainted. We are well acquainted. What a mare. Oh well. Sorry Mark. The most serious thoughts provoked in my mind by last night’s proceedings need to be thought about and written about separately, which I will do, hopefully today but if not then Real Soon Now. The most intriguing other titbit I picked up came courtesy of Christian Michel, who will be the speaker at my next Brian’s Friday (June 28). Christian said that, concerning the subject he will be addressing (what libertarianism should do about crime) he has now changed his mind. He did a piece a year or two ago about Restitution, which he has now removed from his Liberalia website, because it’s wrong, he now says. (Wrong? What kind of a reason is that to take something down from a website?) But aha! The Libertarian Alliance still has Christian’s now abandoned intellectual child (as Legal Notes No. 33: Restitution: Justice in a Stateless Society), and always will have it. Anyway, my point is, it should be an amusing little gathering on June 28, and we all know what to read by way of preparation, to find out exactly which misguided fool it is that Christian Michel now disagrees with. Himself. Seriously, I believe that the willingness to reject what you later decide are your own errors is one of the key indicators of a superior mind. Final titbit of news. Tim Evans has now moved to his new job with the Centre for the New Europe. He said that he was already agreeably surprised by the number, quality and academic grandeur of Continental Europe’s libertarians. You will definitely be hearing more from Samizdata about these people and their various writings, sayings and doings. Bring on the Brazilians. June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I often claim that the United States is just as bad (in its own way) as Britain (this fits in well with my “we are all doomed” view of the universe). However a couple of things over the last 24 hours have produced doubts in my mind. Yesterday I was playing with my computer and looked up the website for South Dakota. It was not a very impressive site and it did not seem to have been created by very bright people, but I did say some things of interest. The Governor of the State casually announced the State’s balanced budget (the State has had a balanced budget every year for the last 113 years), he also mentioned (in passing) that the voters (not the politicians) had voted to get rid of the death tax (the state inheritance tax). South Dakota does not seem to have much in the way of taxes – no income tax, no business profits tax, a sales tax that is a fraction of ours. It also seems to have little trade union power and the Governor has finished selling off all the state enterprises that were created in the early 1900’s. The leader of the Democrats in the Senate represents South Dakota – perhaps he should look at his own State sometime. It is not just a bunch of subsidized farmers anymore. Meanwhile back in Britain. I went to pick up an inhaler today (interesting contradiction – I claim I want to die and yet I go to absurd lengths to stay alive). I presented my prescription to the lady at the chemist shop and she said “you have not ticked any of the exemption boxes”. I explained that I was exempt – that I paid for my prescription. “No, you must tick one of the exception boxes” (said the lady). I pointed out the old saying that “someone, somewhere must pay” – “you have met him” I said “it is me”. “You have not ticked any of the exemption boxes” (said the lady). Eventually I was able to pay for my prescription. However, I think this type of conversation is the death rattle of the Welfare State (and not in the nice sense that we are about to see free market reform). I do not think I would have this sort of conversation in South Dakota. Paul Marks June 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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